A new edition of The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook, takes off on a tangent from what has become NIGHT OF THE HUNTER Week here on Shadowplay — a brief consideration of Charles Laughton’s only other film-directing gig, THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER.
Pour yourself a pastis (whatever that is) and enjoy.
There’s an amazing extra on the new Criterion disc of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. Well, there’s lots, actually. CHARLES LAUGHTON DIRECTS NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, Robert Gitt’s amazing presentation of rushes and outtakes from Laughton’s film is the standout. I saw Gitt present this at Edinburgh Filmhouse many moons ago, and immediately asked him if it was going to appear on a DVD. He looked a little sad and said that since MGM had already released the film as a bare-bones DVD, there seemed little immediate prospect of that. So hooray for Blu-Ray!
But the bit I wanted to talk about is in the AFI interview with cinematographer Stanley Cortez. This is a nifty little profile, in which, asides from remarking on Cortez’s close physical resemblance to his brother, 30s star Riccardo Cortez (AKA Mr. Sleaze), we get a valuable insight into the director-cinematographer collaboration.
Cortez remarks that as he was lighting the bedroom set for Shelley Winters’ murder, Laughton asked him what he was thinking. This, incidentally, is a question no straight man ever seems to ask of another. Fiona has given up asking me, because I always say, “I’m thinking, ‘What am I thinking?’” The question always destroys whatever thought I was having: however intriguing it looked from the outside of my head, it must have been very fragile on the inside. Not so with Cortez.
“None of your damn business,” he told Laughton, or words to that effect. “Because we had that kind of a relationship,” he grinned. And this seems to be the case: as Simon Callow describes their first meeting on THE MAN IN THE EIFFEL TOWER ~
‘”So you’re taking the picture over,’ said Laughton to Cortez on the latter’s first day. ‘Well, I’m happy to meet you, you big bastard.’ To which Cortez replied, ‘I’m very happy to meet you, you fat son of a bitch.’”
Laughton insisted, however, on knowing what was going through Cortez’s mind as he lit the set, and Cortez eventually said, “I’m thinking of a piece of music.” Now Laughton wanted to know what it was. “Valse Triste,” said Cortez.
Sibelius’s Valse Triste gets animated in the movie ALLEGRO NON TROPPO.
This news hit Laughton like a thunderbolt, and he immediately called the film’s composer, Walter Schumann, and told him that the Valse Triste was the musical key to the whole sequence. See the finished film, and Schumann’s waltz, which builds to a terrifying crescendo, is the backbone of the scene, in the same way the scoring of the river journey makes of it a virtual symphony of sound and image.
Laughton’s telepathy here, and I can think of no better word for it — he knew Cortez was thinking something important, and when he got it out of him he knew what to do with it — is a beautiful illustration of artistic sensitivity at its highest pitch of perfection. And so is the whole scene. In Gitt’s accompanying documentary, we see how Laughton labours to get just the right line reading from Winters (for a line eventually played in long shot), risking staleness in her performance by having her repeat it again and again, eventually emerging out the other side of that automatism that sets in after ten or so repetitions…
Shelley lies in a coffin of light.
And we hear Laughton say, before each take of the medium long shot, “The emptiness of Satan, and the cowardice of the religious hypocrite.” It’s like an invocation. It’s obviously directed at Mitchum, who’s expected to project all this with his back to the camera. And he does.
The phrase embraces many of the contradictions of preacher Harry Powell’s character — his horror of and fascination with sex is part of his hypocrisy, and yet his belief in his evil God is sincere enough for him to have frank conversations with the man upstairs. This was apparently the one part of the role that Mitchum had doubts about (and at the end of his career, his one question for Jim Jarmusch on DEAD MAN was, “Am I really talking to myself, or really to the stuffed bear?”) but you wouldn’t know it from the way he pulls it off. Mitchum, faking driving against a rear projection screen, talks to God for expository purposes, and is utterly convincing.
In the build-up to the murder, he seems to be communicating with his God too. How else to explain that strange gesture he makes as he’s working up the never to kill? It’s almost Frankensteinian. It’s more like dance than acting. Without music, how would it look? Without Cortez’s skillful lighting?
Incidentally, in this famous shot, not only does the camera seem to be outside the room, so does Shelley’s bed, hovering in a void.
The script clearly alternates between seeing the preacher as Satan, as a psychopath, and as a pathetic sub-human animal — but this is what Satan is, once you get him trapped in your barn. But in fact, there’s no contradiction in any of these things, even if Mitchum’s wild alterations of tone seem to reinforce the feeling of the character as being fragmented, broken inside into several discrete beings, all of them dangerous and unpleasant, for sure, but none of them wholly reconcilable with one another. That’s true hypocrisy, I suppose, the compartmentalizing of incompatible beliefs and drives, to create a dysfunctional but operational whole.
I’ve never known quite what to think about people who talk to God and think He talks back. People who hear voices are not necessarily suffering from a mental illness in the accepted sense. And people with mental illnesses who hear voices are not necessarily dangerous. A differentiation between the two groups is that if you know that the voice is originating from your own head, you’re probably sane and safe. You can assess whether to act on what the voice says by treating its advice as you would anybody else’s. But what of those who are clinically sane, but believe the voice they’re hearing is God’s? I can’t agree with them, for starters. And I can’t quite regard them as safe, either. They may have sanity, but they don’t have insight… Hearing voices and lacking insight into where they actually come from can be associated with schizophrenia, but maybe they’re more hazardous when they’re not.
I’m inclined to position the fictional preacher in this category — I don’t think we can consider him insane, although psychopathic certainly is a good diagnosis. His relationship with the voice in his head, like the Yorkshire Ripper’s, is a decidedly unhealthy one, and it’s made all the more dangerous by his superior cunning and ambition…
…has been looking at Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER? Only William Friedkin, around the time he was making THE EXORCIST.
Or if not, it’s a w ild coincidence.
Of course, Friedkin has talked about how the famous poster shot of Father Merrin arriving at the house in Georgetown was influenced by René Magritte’s painting The Empire of Light (above), but I think it’s that close. Maybe he used that as a cue when discussing the scene with DoP Owen Roizman, and maybe Roizman thought of Charles Laughton and Stanley Cortez’s imagery. Or maybe Friedkin saw Bernardo Bertolucci making the much more reasonable claim that Magritte’s “day for night” painting was a reference point for Vittorio Storaro’s THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM — the thought stuck in the sausage-meat electrical storm of Friedkin’s brain, and he later “originated” it by the simple procedure of opening his yap.
Then there’s this ~
Okay, not that close, and one might fairly ask how many ways there are of shooting somebody standing over somebody else who’s lying in a bed? Actually, quite a few, and most of them are in THE EXORCIST. So much of that damn film takes place in a single bedroom… I’m convinced that’s why they cast Max Von S: one look at him reminds you that long static scenes in rooms CAN be cinematically compelling.
At any rate, these two images have so much in common viscerally that leafing through film books as a kid, I think I somehow confused or conflated the two movies, imagining some kind of NIGHT OF THE EXORCIST.
What a messed-up film that would be. For, with its horror of female sexuality and the body, THE EXORCIST is more like the film preacher Harry Powell would have made if Warners gave him the money.
The Night of the Hunter (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
Shadowplay
